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April 24, 1916 | Irish Nationalists Stage Easter Uprising in Dublin

By The Learning Network April 24, 2012 4:04 amApril 24, 2012 4:04 am

Weekly Irish Times, Vol.44.0.2,078, Dublin, Saturday April 29, 1916Patrick Pearse, the Irish Republican Brotherhood leader, read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic at the general post office during the Easter Rising.

Historic Headlines

On April 24, 1916, on Easter Monday, groups of Irish nationalists revolted against British rule by seizing a post office and other buildings in Dublin and declaring the formation of the Irish Republic.

Members of paramilitary organizations Irish Republican Brotherhood and Irish Citizen Army led the insurrection. The leaders hoped to take advantage of the deployment of British troops to the battlefields of World War
I, leaving fewer of them available to control Ireland. Their plans for the insurrection were compromised when the leader of the Irish Volunteers ordered his men not to take part and when a shipment of German arms
did not arrive. Nevertheless, they decided to proceed with the uprising knowing that it would likely be crushed.

The revolt began when the rebels marched to the general post office and replaced the British flag with an Irish tricolor and a flag reading “Irish Republic.” Patrick Pearse, a leader of the I.R.B., read
the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which asserted, “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.”

The New York Times offered a day-by-day account of the Easter Rising in its May 1 edition, after reliable communication
from Dublin had been re-established. It reported, “The authorities, unprepared at first to deal with the uprising, ordered the police and soldiers to retire at once to their quarters.” The British
received reinforcements in the ensuing days and began a counterattack on Friday that put down the uprising.

British authorities arrested more than 3,500 men and women. They quickly court-martialed the leaders and executed 15 of them from May 3 to May 12. The I.C.A. leader James Connolly, injured during the uprising, had to
be strapped to a chair to face the firing squad. Many other participants, including the I.R.B. organizer Michael Collins, were sent to Frongoch internment camp in Wales, where they plotted future rebellions.

The Easter Rising played a significant role in Ireland’s fight for independence, which it achieved in 1921 following a two-and-a-half-year war. Most Dublin citizens had not supported the uprising, but the harsh
penalties imposed by the British created sympathy for the rebels and the republican movement.

The Times sought the analysis of prominent Irish-Americans for an article in its April 30 edition. It reported, somewhat
presciently: “Irish separatists in this country do not believe that the uprising in Dublin was the formal planned beginning of a revolution … But they do believe that Ireland’s golden opportunity
for revolution has come, and that the Dublin incident … will serve very well for the historian of a Free Ireland as a picturesque point of departure — in short, another Boston Tea Party or Battle of
Lexington.”

Connect to Today:

In a 1991 article, The Times noted that the “Easter Rising also proved to be a dress rehearsal for much good and ill
that lay ahead as empires fell and ordinary people entered history. … It was a cycle that would be repeated with variations in half a hundred colonies: rebellion and repression, martyrs and massacres, victory
and partition, civil war and the emergence of a single strong leader who had once been held in a colonial prison.”

The second half of the 20th century, especially, witnessed a number of such moments as nations and territories struggled to free themselves from colonial or former Soviet rule. To what extent to do you think the empires
of the past continue to haunt modern struggles, like the Arab Spring revolutions or the formation of South Sudan?
Why?